Big Noise is managing the career of Cecile Clement Grobe and representing
Cecile's catalog of recordings and songs for placement
and licensing in film, TV, and advertising. Music supervisors
can contact Big Noise about Cecile's catalog at 401-274-4770
(USA) or by emailing al@bignoisenow.com.

'Christmasland' (Big Noise) is Cecile's very first
holiday recording. The CD is a beautifully constructed song
cycle and holiday scrapbook that combines ten joyful seasonal
classics with seven of Cecile's sparkling original compositions,
evoking the great traditional heart-felt themes of families
gathering together, and couples falling in love during the
treasured holiday season.

Cecile received her formal training at the Juilliard School of Music, where she was a student of Carl Friedberg, who was the last surviving student of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms.

She went on to pursue her career as a classical pianist, which has included performing at Carnegie Recital Hall. She has been hailed by critics as a pianist of unerring sensitivity with disciplined romanticism, the keynote of her style.

Cecile tours extensively performing her original works.

More

In the early 1990's, life as
a concert pianist performing other composers' works and
as a teacher was good. And maybe it would have stayed that
way if not for a twist of fate.

One of her students, Joyce Kilmartin,
encouraged her to start sharing the original compositions
she had started to write with others. With Joyce's support
and marketing expertise, Cecile soon found herself on a
new path.

She began composing feverishly,
something she'd always enjoyed but had always thought of
as a personal interest rather than a professional one. That
was to change, however, as she began performing her new
works live and meeting with the audiences' responses.

In her own words: "My work comes from my experiences and I always learn something about myself. But from the overwhelming response of audiences, I realize that this personal experience is not personal at all. It is part of all of us, not mine, but ours."

"When I used to perform Bach and people didn't like it, I'd say, 'Oh well, they don't like Bach.' But when I started performing my own music, it was different."

Suddenly, as she began to talk to her audiences about her own music, she was somehow different. The sparkle in her eyes. The intensity on her face. The hands waving in the air as she described what she heard. What she felt. "You just reach a place inside where you are doing what you need to."

The Providence Journal described that: "One of the
things I like best about Cecile's performance is that not
only does her music sound so wonderful, but she tells you
how she came up with it, like how she went walking in the
woods and came back feeling so good that she captured that
feeling in her music."

She translates her thoughts, her feelings, into the crescendos and the diminuendos, the dissonance and the harmony of her music. The romantic style that Cecile trained in with Carl Friedberg, with its musical flourishes and lush melodic tapestry is perfect to carry the emotive power of her compositions.

Places Cecile Has Taught:
Carnegie School of Music (NJ)
University of Massachusetts
Juilliard School of Music (as assistant to Jane Carlson)

Awards:

The National Academy of
Recording Arts & Sciences
placed Cecile Clement Grobe on the
Official Ballot for the 2008 Grammy Awards:
Record Of the Year - 'Yule Fire'
Best Pop Instrumental Performance - 'Holiday Romance'
Best Instrumentalist Soloist Performance - 'Winter Interlude'
Best Classical Contemporary Composition - 'Yule Fire'
Best Classical Crossover Album - 'Christmasland'

The National Academy of
Recording Arts & Sciences
placed Cecile Clement Grobe on the
Official Ballot for the 2006 Grammy Awards:
Record Of the Year - 'Rhapsody'
Album of the Year - 'Transformation'
Best Classical Album - 'Transformation'
Best Instrumentalist Soloist Performance - 'Jeanine's Song'
Best Classical Contemporary Composition - 'Tears & Rain'

The National Academy of
Recording Arts & Sciences
placed Cecile Clement Grobe on the
Official Ballot for the 2005 Grammy Awards:
Song Of the Year - 'Trees'
Best Classical Album - 'In This Moment'
Best Instrumentalist Soloist Performance - 'Trees'
Best Classical Contemporary Composition - 'Trees'

Miscellaneous:

- Debuted her original compositions
at
the University of Massachusetts
- Member of RISA
- 'Trees' chosen for First Night Providence 10th Anniversary
CD
- All compositions recorded and produced at Normandy Sound
(Phil Greene and Robert Pemberton, engineers)
and at Celebration Sound (Christine Lilley, engineer)

Press

Rick Massimo, The Providence Journal:

Cecile Clement Grobe
Christmasland
(Big Noise)

The Massachusetts classical pianist has come out with a winning
collection of Christmas favorites with a few similarly memorable
originals, all done in a plain, straight solo setting.

'Joy to the
World' is lush and wintry-bright; 'Angels We Have Heard On High,' is
ornate, speedy and precise; 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,' is full of
speedy flourishes, and the originals, especially 'Christmas Eve,' and
'Evergreen,' are right in the pocket, accessible without being
predictable, with enough off-kilter harmonies not to have to hide behind
the Christmas-music excuse.

A winner.

Jim Macnie, The Providence Phoenix:

A performing pianist who has internalized the classical canon and worked in such vaunted venues as Carnegie Recital Hall, Cecile Clement Grobe was fulfilling her dream of being a sublime interpreter until she began writing her own music 15 years ago.

With their breadth, grace, and lilt, the original pieces were received
even more positively than the classical masterworks that were her stock
in trade; subsequently audiences now applaud C.C. Grobe the composer.

She will play tunes that come off like jukebox fantasias and impressions
of holiday songs from her new CD, 'Christmasland' tonight at 7 pm.

Make time for the joy of Christmas
by Rita Lussier
Providence Journal

I'm trying to find a place I haven't been to in a long while. That's why
I've come here to the Warwick Public Library.

As it turns out, I'm not alone. In fact, all of the chairs set up in
this function room are taken, so my late arrival finds me standing in the
back by the refreshment table. Not a bad place to be.

I take a cookie and a seat on the floor where I have a bird's-eye view
of the decorations on the table. Looking through the holly berries, I
can see Santa. He's the engineer on a wooden train heading out over the
white tablecloth. It says JOY on his train. I'm hoping for a ride.

When Cecile Clement Grobe invited me here for her Christmas concert, I
did the usual thing I do when I just can't do anymore. No way, I
thought. I would have to move everything around on my schedule. Who has
time just to sit and listen to Christmas music?

WHO HAS TIME JUST TO SIT AND LISTEN TO CHRISTMAS MUSIC?

Can you believe it? That's what I asked myself. And that's how my
schedule got shuffled along with my priorities and I made it here,
albeit at the last minute. But here I am.

And there's Mrs. Grobe taking her seat at the piano in front of the
room, ready to perform the selections from her new CD, 'Christmasland.'

I've had the pleasure of hearing this 2008 Grammy-recognized pianist and
composer from Fall River perform before. What I especially enjoy,
besides her music, is the disarming way she introduces each piece and
shares insights of how her experiences were transposed onto the
keyboard.

Somewhere in between her rhythmic rendition of 'Santa Claus Is Coming to
Town' and her romantic composition, 'Yule Fire,' a gear shifts in my
brain and I find myself transported on a lovely ride from hectic
Christmas Present to carefree Christmas Past.

From packing and mailing to peeking at presents. From cooking and baking
to nibbling the head off a gingerbread boy. From wrapping and decorating
to caroling by the tree. From shoveling and driving to snow glistening
in the lane.

It's as if, right here sitting on the floor of the Warwick Public
Library, I've finally remembered why we are doing all this in the first
place.

'My work comes from my experiences and I always learn something about
myself,' says Mrs. Grobe. 'But from the overwhelming response of
audiences, I realize that this personal experience is not personal at
all. It is part of all of us, not mine, but ours.'

What I learned about myself thanks to a ride through 'Christmasland' is
this: When I feel pressured to trim the tree I tend to blind myself to
all the things that I love about the season. In my effort to tackle an
extra long list, I let slip away the very things that would actually put
me in the spirit to do everything else.

Maybe it's caroling with a choir. Meeting a friend for lunch. Stopping
for hot cocoa with the kids. Going for a ride to see the lights. Sipping
eggnog by the fire. Or yes, just sitting and listening to Christmas
music.

Who has time just to sit and listen to Christmas music?

You do. I do.

Take the time. Take the break. Take the joy.

We deserve it.

For the moment:
This musician writes music of her heart
by Rita Lussier
Providence Journal

I've never tried to write with music
playing in the background. Some people do it all the time, I know. But
for some reason, in order to tell you this particular story, I need to
hear this. It's a piece called "Impasse."

It's by Cecile Clement Grobe of Fall River
-- Mrs. Grobe, to me. It opens slowly at first, much like the story of
how it all began for her. The piano lessons at age 8. The influence of
her mother, a singer who performed in New York with Fred Allen. The
years at the Juilliard School of Music studying with Carl Friedberg, the
last surviving student of Johannes Brahms.

As the composition begins to build, layer
added to layer, I think of the changes life had in store for Mrs. Grobe.
The love. The marriage. The move to New Jersey. The daughter. And yet,
what remained constant was her passion for the piano as she performed at
prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall and Juilliard's Recital Hall,
earning critical acclaim for her "unerring sensitivity and romanticism"
along the way.

Life as a concert pianist and a teacher
was good. And maybe it would have stayed that way, she told me, if not
for two things: "black ice and death."

About a decade ago, Mrs. Grobe slipped on
a sheet of ice and shattered the bones in her arm -- and her ability to
play for a while. At about the same time, three close relatives died. It
was an emotional time with a huge outpouring of feelings. And without
her usual way of expressing them on the keyboard, they had no place to
go. But before long, they did.

Mrs. Grobe created "Pathos" out of her
grief when her mother died. Out of her pain watching the the aftermath
of the Oklahoma City bombing, she wrote "Tears and Rain." Out of her
despair at hearing news of war, she composed "A March For Peace."

One of her students -- my friend, Joyce
Kilmartin, who first introduced me to Mrs. Grobe -- encouraged her to
share what she had written with others. With Joyce's support and
marketing expertise, Mrs. Grobe soon found herself on a new path.

By their very nature, however, new paths
can be uneven. "When I used to perform Bach and people didn't like it,
I'd say, 'Oh well, they don't like Bach.' But when I started performing
my own music, it was different."

And suddenly, as she began to talk about
her own music, she was somehow different. The sparkle in her eyes. The
intensity on her face. The hands waving in the air as she described what
she heard. What she felt. "You just reach a place inside where you are
doing what you need to."

"When you get older, you look at things
differently. You look at the world differently. You see that we are all
the same but there's this wall built up in between us. 'Impasse' is
about this wall. We need to tear it down."

How she translates these thoughts, these
feelings, into the crescendos and the diminuendos, the dissonance and
the harmony that I'm listening to is hard to describe.

Al Gomes, her manager from Big
Noise, an A&R recording artist development company in
Providence, submitted several of Mrs. Grobe's compositions
to the Grammy Awards this year. According to Gomes, four of her pieces were on the list sent to members who make Grammy nominations.

So what I'm hearing is that a woman from
Fall River followed her passion to Juilliard and on to Carnegie Hall and
eventually back home, where she fell on ice and grieved for those she
loved but then rose up and transformed what she was feeling into
compositions that made it all the way onto the ballot of the 2005 Grammy
Awards. Tearing down walls? I'd say so.

World-class pianist comes to Coventry:
Pianist and composer Cecile Clement Grobe will be back
by popular demand to perform
by Jessica Carr
Kent County Daily Times

"We welcomed Cecile in to Coventry
last year and we are hoping more people will come this year
and enjoy her wonderful performance," said Jane Schweinsburg,
an employee at the Coventry Public Library that helps to
organize the performances. "She is just a magnificent performer
and I wouldn't be surprised if she got a Grammy for her
work."

As a former student at the Julliard
School of Music under the instruction of Lonny Epstein,
a Mozart specialist, and Carl Friedberg, the last surviving
student of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, Grobe was
able to develop into a renowned musician. As a professional
concert pianist, Grobe has performed at such prestigious
recital halls as Carnegie and Julliard. She has been hailed
by critics as a pianist of "unerring sensitivity" with "Disciplined
romanticism," the key note of her style.

"Cecile puts together music of a classical new wave
sound that feels almost like Brazilian jazz and it's all
her own music, only her music," said Schweinsburg.

"One of the things I like best about her performance is that not only does her music sound so wonderful, but she tells you about how she came up with it like how she went walking in the woods and came back feeling so good so she captured that feeling in her music."

Grobe has been composing her own music since the
early 1990s, but according to information provided from
the library about her, it was something she did merely as
a hobby rather than as a professional gesture. Once Grobe
became aware of immensely positive response from her audiences
at the end of each public appearance, she explained how
"my work comes from my experiences and I always learn something
about myself, but from the overwhelming response of audiences.
I realize this personal experience is not personal at all,
it is part of us all, not mine, but ours."

Fan Mail

Dear Cecile:

Once again, a triumph of musicality and
soul! Recently, we discussed a memoir called 'Reading Lolita in Tehran'
by Azar Nafisi at the Library. It is the story of a group of women
struggling against repression in the Islamic regime in Iran, secretly
meeting to discuss literature in the author's home. One of the
characters in the memoir is a friend of Nafisi's she calls 'the
magician.' He is her mentor and helps her keep her sanity in the midst
of an impossible situation-but, since he is an artist and a philosopher,
he is more than a 'mentor,' he is a lodestone, a guiding light, someone
who is able to give her what she needs to grow as a human being, grow
enough to transcend the situation on some higher level of
soul-functioning.

That book got me to thinking about
'magicians' in my own life. Cecile, you are definitely a 'magician' in
mine! Though we haven't spent much time together, you have a profound
impact on my thinking, and my sense of what is possible and impossible
to achieve as a human being. I loved hearing your gorgeous music, it
opened up spatial landscapes in my mind that really felt
three-dimensional, and seemed to pry some hidden doors open in my
innermost being as well. Giving rustily at first, then swinging freely
on their hinges by song's end! And I drank in your words just as
thirstily - so honest, generative, wise and transcendently loving. Thank
you so, so much for your generous gift to the Library, Cecile! And here
is to the 'magician' you so triumphantly are! Let's keep in touch.

Love, Lauri B.

Dear Cecile,

During your concert in Coventry, I
realized that it had been too long since I had enjoyed live music by a
performer with such concentrated talent.

For me, your gifts combine the best of
19th, 20th and 21st century music and made it all your own. I have a
theory that the experience of sound is related to the experience of
touch - that the sound waves can caress our minds and heal us in much
the same ways a healing touch does.

Thank you for translating so much of what
you feel on behalf of us all into a medium that touches us all.

Bravo, bravo!

Jane Schweinsburg
Coventry Public Library

Dear Cecile,

As I said to you on the day of your
concert - that was the best artistic and spiritual experience I've had
in a long, long time. You are a wonderful person, whose beauty shines
out to a high luster with the added power of your training and
technique.

I was in awe of what you can say with a
keyboard - and with your voice and manner in your commentary as well.
BRAVO!!!

Love,
Lauri B.

Dear Cecile,

It was an unexpected pleasure to happen
upon your piano performance at Border's this afternoon. You play
with energy and focus and your original compositions speak volumes about
your spiritual generosity.

'Trees' is about a walk you had in
the woods. That walk must have taken place in the autumn; you could
almost hear leaves fall to the ground in a delicate, playful way from a
strong and mighty tree.

A woman from the audience asked you to
play 'Impasse' which you said is about breaking down the walls
that separate us, one from the other. It begins with a constant and
strong percussive repetition - chipping away, chipping away - but not
nagging. Chipping away with lightness and even humor.

'Jeanine's Song,' written for your
daughter, who you said always wants you to go further. 'It's a toughie,'
you said. 'It was a tough one.' I think I saw (or heard) what you meant
by it. It was a thicker stew, a thicker texture. Threads added later,
perhaps gold threads, to add an unexpected sparkle to the weave. But
when I say 'thicker,' I have to add that it never once got "heavy."

And 'Wildflowers' - about freedom -
soared! Bravo! (Or Brava!)

Sincerely,Barbara Waterston
Providence Magazine

Saudacoes, Cecile:

Your material arrived. I love it!

I'm still pre-producing the programs, and
when I get more details I'll tell you. The station is called "Radio
Cultura" and is located in Campinas (Sao Paulo state) and their waves
reach 10 cities around.

And there is the posibility of your work
being on the air at a radio station called "Eldorado," located in Sao
Paulo. I give you more details as soon as I get them.